Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder bringing you the latest on

travel, whether you're on a fantastic journey somewhere or just planning your next trip. Well,

there's an awful lot of people right now who aren't where they want to be at all. Those are the

people whose flights have been cancelled. I've been watching this through the weekend. Effectively,

EasyJet British Airways cancelling about 100 flights a day each. That's roughly 30,000 people

who are not going on the flight they booked.

Now, British Airways in particular says, yep, we've been canceling proactively weeks ahead,

so this won't actually affect too many people.

Unfortunately, there are some very short notice cancellations.

EasyJet is also filleting its schedules,

but they're tending to do it just a couple of days in advance.

Either is maddening.

And they say the reason is, well, high levels of COVID infections.

And that's certainly part of the story.

Of course, like all public-facing businesses, they've got an awful

lot of staff who are off sick. However, I think there's also a more underlying problem. And that is

demand has returned in the sense that loads of travel restrictions have fallen away just this afternoon. For instance,

Malta said, right, unvaccinated Brits, you can come in from a week today. And many of us want to get

away quite often families for the first holiday they've had in two years. But unfortunately,

the supply of seats hasn't kept pace. And I think airlines have been

effectively selling a wish list of flights and unfortunately, particularly when you get high

levels of COVID, they are just unable to meet that. All sorts of reasons, they've lost a great number of excellent people during the COVID pandemic.

...